Germans admit tracking hijackers

Agency: Bin Laden alerted operatives day before attacks

January 25, 2003|By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent.

HAMBURG, Germany — More potential missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot emerged Friday with the first acknowledgment that German authorities began receiving intelligence on the hijackers and their associates more than three years before the hijackings occurred.

The acknowledgment came during testimony at the 3-month-old trial of Mounir El Motassadeq, a former engineering student here who is charged as an accessory to 3,045 murders, the number of people believed to have died on Sept. 11, 2001.

The court also heard testimony that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who has claimed responsibility for the Sept. 11 plot, issued a "worldwide appeal" for all Al Qaeda operatives to return urgently to Afghanistan before Sept. 10, 2001.

Motassadeq's lawyers argue that because their client remained in Hamburg after Sept. 11 rather than fleeing Germany with three other alleged conspirators, he could not have belonged to Al Qaeda or had advance knowledge of the hijackings. It was unclear what form the bin Laden appeal is supposed to have taken.

A lawyer for the German secret service testified that her agency had not known of the Sept. 10 alert at the time it was issued and later learned of it from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. However, a U.S. intelligence official said the CIA never had evidence of any last-minute alert from bin Laden.

"It's just not the case," said the official, who declined to be identified.

The BND could not immediately be reached for comment.

Syrian's phone tapped

A senior official of Germany's federal police also told the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg that Germany's domestic intelligence agency, known as the BFV, had tapped the telephone of a close associate of several members of the Hamburg Al Qaeda cell.

The subject of that wiretap, a Syrian immigrant named Mohammed Haydar Zammar, now jailed in Syria, has admitted to Syrian authorities encouraging Mohamed Atta, the leader of the hijacking plot, and several of Atta's associates to make a fateful visit to an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the fall of 1999.

Previous testimony revealed that while Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah and Ramzi Binalshibh traveled to Afghanistan in hopes of later joining Muslim fighters in Chechnya, they were instead presented by Al Qaeda higher-ups with the outlines of another plan that evolved into the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Sources said Zammar, 43, first came to the attention of the BFV in 1995 after a tip from another European intelligence service that Zammar had made more than 40 visits to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, where he later said he fought alongside the mujahedeen, as Islamic warriors are known. The BFV, curious about Zammar's activities, opened an investigation.

One senior German official said the investigation, which lasted until 1999, had not been opened because of any suspected ties between Zammar and Al Qaeda, which was not yet perceived as a major threat, but as part of a joint effort with the other intelligence agency "to learn more about the mujahedeen."

Beginning in August of 1998, some of the conversations overheard included sporadic mentions of men who later proved to be Atta, al-Shehhi and several fellow Hamburg students who shared their radical Islamic views--including, according to Friday's testimony, someone named "Mounir," whom prosecutors contend is the defendant Motassadeq.

U.S. criticism rejected

U.S. intelligence officers have been quoted as criticizing their German counterparts for not moving more aggressively to identify and track Zammar's associates, with the implication that the Germans might have been able to abort the hijacking plot. But one German source familiar with the investigation noted that the conversations had contained only the first names of Zammar's friends, leaving the BFV with nothing concrete to go on until Feb. 17, 1999.

That day, a caller to the third-floor walkup in a middle-class section of Hamburg where Zammar was then living with his wife and six children was told Zammar wasn't available "because he's meeting Mohamed, Ramzi and Said."

"Mohamed" referred to Mohamed Atta, "Ramzi" to Ramzi Binalshibh, the self-proclaimed organizer of the hijacking plot captured last year in Pakistan, and "Said" to Said Bahaji, who along with Binalshibh fled Hamburg in the days before Sept. 11.

The caller was given the number of the Hamburg apartment where the meeting was taking place, offering investigators what they say was the first clue to the identity of Zammar's young associates.

Because of the low priority given the Zammar investigation, the recorded conversation wasn't translated from Arabic for several months. Under German law at the time, before an intercepted conversation could be translated it was necessary for a judge to decide whether it was relevant.